OK, so this has been circulating around on Facebook today, so you may have already come across it. But I decided to re-post it here. It's nice to know that even some big corporations can occasionally have a sense of humor!

OMG this is FUNNY! (even your teenager will smile!) Truly, check it out. Call the Nestle Crunch Hotline at 800-295-0051. When asked if you want to continue in English, wait quietly for about 10 seconds and you will smile. Promise! Keep going and press 4. Listen to the options…then press 7. If you comment on this after listening, don't give away the surprise! If it's busy, it's worth it to redial a few times!

Who knows, maybe this is an experiment in social marketing to see if they can get people to call their customer service line and listen to the message?

While there are a number of apps for the iPhone that allow you to do limited voice recognition for looking up contacts and searching Google, Dragon dictation is the first to allow you to speak normally and turn your thoughts into text. Surprisingly, it does so with almost no mistakes.

What makes Dragon dictation particularly unique is that it requires no training to work. Most desktop applications require some training to work correctly. Typically you have to read paragraphs of text for it to become more accurate at understanding your speech pattern. Dragon dictation takes advantage of your data connection to upload your voice recording to the Dragon servers, where you can use more powerful computers to interpret your voice, and then sends the text back to your iPhone.

OK, this is a bit technical for my personal blog, but since I haven't yet redesigned my macexpert.com website for blogging, I decided to put it here.

Since January 1, I've discovered that a large amount of email coming into my server has been marked as spam by the built-in filtering software, SpamAssassin. When SpamAssassin blocks a message, it flags it and stores it, along with a header that explains why it was blocked. SpamAssassin is part of the standard mail server installation on most Linux-based internet mail servers.

I need to give you a little lesson in spam filter logic so this makes sense. There are a number of rules that SpamAssassin applies to a message to determine whether or not to block it. Based on the trigger, SpamAssassin assign a point value. If the total number of points adds up to a threshold number that the administrator has put in the settings, SpamAssassin flags the message as spam. Typically, the default threshold number is set to 5 by default on a mail server.